


Time Isn't Holding Up

by alitbitmoody



Series: Same As It Ever Was [1]
Category: Re-Animator (Movies), The 4400
Genre: Developing Powers, Gen, Government Agencies, Herbert West-Typical Paranoia, Herbert West-Typical Sexism, M/M, Missing Persons, Panic Attacks, Pre-Slash, Reunions, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-01-21 14:43:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12459927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alitbitmoody/pseuds/alitbitmoody
Summary: On October 18, 1985, medical student Herbert West disappears from Arkham, Massachusetts. Nineteen years later, he wakes up on Highland Beach near Mt. Rainier in Washington. He's not alone.





	1. Chapter 1

He's near water. That's the first thing he's aware of before other things move in to overwhelm his senses. Fresh water, no salt smell of the ocean or the thick, polluted smell of the Miskatonic River in Arkham. Just cold air, lake sediment from the water, traces of salt and iron in the silt making the air -- misty, dark with nightfall -- taste like pennies. Or blood.

He’s fallen asleep standing before – usually at a lab table, the kitchen counter in a previous foster home, once in the hallway of his dorm at NYU. Waking up from that feels similar to this -- the cloudy disorientation replaced by alarm. 

The next thing he's aware of is people. 

A lot of people. 

An _interminable number_ of people, without much ground left to support them all, elbows and shoulders colliding as everyone fights for breathing room. 

He's unfortunate enough to be in the middle with everyone's body heat merging together in a rapid suffusion that feels like a funeral pyre. It's dark and crowded and loud. Getting louder. He soon has enough contact high from other people's confusion escalating quickly to a form of group hysteria that his own body shuts down before he can utter a single word. The instinct to panic and shout suffocated like a flame deprived of oxygen.

He still tries by the time the paramedics retrieve him, loading him and so many others into a parade of ambulances, fluorescent lights and loud sirens and too much, too... much... 

He wakes up long enough to count two people in the back of the ambulance -- the uniformed EMT strapping him to a gurney and someone in civilian clothes who is absolutely not an EMT. The not-nurse pats his arm after the last strap is fastened (just to be sure). 

"I'm from Homeland Security. We’re here to help you."

\--

Herbert West has never heard of Homeland Security or the National Threat Assessment Center. But, by the time he wakes up half-dressed in a hospital bed, two IV lines running fluids and sedatives to his system, there's a file on him with their seal printed on the front cover. He flips through it slowly with his free hand (this bed has straps, too) while the agent that brought it stands at his elbow.

__

_Name: Herbert West_  
_Returnee: 1,095_  
_DOB: 05/29/1961_  
_Disappeared: October 18, 1985  
_ _Declared Dead: March 1, 1986_

"I thought a person had to be missing for seven years in the United States before they were declared dead?" he asks, eyeing the death certificate, the scan of his photo ID from Miskatonic University, his admissions application, a news clipping in German from shortly after Dr. Gruber died.

"Seven years without sufficient evidence of life," the agent answers. "There was enough evidence of your death for a murder investigation."

The abbreviated version from the agent reads almost like a police blotter: minimal details and concise statements. She's clearly trying to get Herbert to fill in the blanks himself, no doubt for the edification of herself and her mysterious government agency, of course. She's tall and smug as she withholds, and Herbert wonders if they tailored her personally for his irritation. 

The suspect was found on the premises where the victim was last seen. A violent encounter with the victim's roommate and and a third party ensued. Discovery led to the victim's property being found on the suspect and the victim's blood being discovered in the basement along with evidence of a recent struggle. Sufficient motive established for arrest, testimony from the victim's roommate and other witnesses at trial sufficient for conviction. Second-degree murder, twenty years to life. All without a body. 

Herbert remains silent as he mentally struggles to plug in the relevant details, fighting against fatigue, disbelief, and a second wave of sensory overload. October 18th for him was yesterday -- he was awake at 4am tinkering in the basement, he squeezed past Dan, eating cornflakes at the kitchen table, to get to the door, nearly tripping over the cat as it pawed at the garbage can.

“How long ago was this?” he posits. 

That, finally, appears to give the agent pause. 

“ _How long?_ ”

The nurse presses a button on his IV stand and he hears the answer under the hum of the machine and the humming in his blood as the opiates hit his system. 

\--

August 14, 2004. The night they found him.

He's been missing... no, dead... no, _gone_ for 19 years.

Herbert allows himself a dopey, high-pitched giggle as he thinks of the eminent and esteemed Dr. Carl Hill in jail for almost two decades. Stops laughing when he thinks of the fact that he'll have to be released now.

\--

"There are others," the doctors, nurses and visiting agents in the observation ward tell Herbert, who can't see much beyond his bed for the first three days, even after they release his straps and allow him to shower and change clothes on his own. 

There are more details, murmurs against the sedation that he's begun to hate. Something about a comet, nuclear missiles, world news. He did not imagine waking up trapped in a crowd of thousands of people – though he never supposed that was imaginary in the first place. 4,400 people to be exact. All with stories similar to Herbert's: they were exploring the woods in Southern Appalachia. They went out for a cigarette on their front porch in Caracas. They were hiding out in a hospital clinic in Rwanda. They were on their way to an anniversary dinner.

In 1946. In 1968. In 1971. In 1992. 

None of them have any memory of the years they lost. None of them have aged. No one can tell them where they were taken, what happened to them, why they were taken or why they were returned _en masse_ lakeside in the mountains of Washington, across distance and time. 

“What’s the last thing that you remember?” they ask, over and over again. Sometimes in the farcical privacy of an examination, sometimes for the posterity of a video camera. “Is there anything you can you tell us?”  
Herbert remains close-lipped, giving in with a few more beeps from the panel, the opiates loosening his tongue. 

He had been on his way to a shift at the hospital morgue. Second shift: 4pm to midnight. Ward, the shift supervisor, had written his name as "KEY" on the schedule and he realized the joke too late for his usual arrival time. He doesn't remember driving, isn't sure he even made it out of the driveway. He'd been alone for most of the day -- his housemate had morning lectures and a... lunch date with his girlfriend. There had been no one there to see him vanish.

He dimly recalls, but does not share other details from that afternoon: not the garbage strewn all over the kitchen floor, not the quick run to the basement lab before work, and definitely not the dead cat hastily shoved onto the top shelf of his fridge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime." I opened my fan fiction of a Lovecraft adaptation with the male protagonist fainting -- the irony is not lost on me. A number of details described here have been gleaned from the Re-Animator novelization by Jeff Rovin, including Ward, the shift supervisor, who has a habit of creating punny nicknames for Dan Cain.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Herbert West is used to institutional living. That doesn't necessarily make him good at it...

They release him from observation to general quarantine after nine days, once they have determined that he is neither a danger to himself nor others. The agent takes Herbert out into the hall to give him instructions to the residents’ block while the nurses restrain his roommate – a schizophrenic woman, disappeared in 1955, who insists (rather loudly) that the staff are plotting to kill her.

“You’re in Block 3A. Go to the end of this hallway and turn right. If you would like me or another agent to accompany you--”

Herbert starts walking before the agent finishes talking. He hopes the neighbors in his new home are quieter.

\--

If observation was numb and confusing, quarantine is like having his skin peeled off and the dermis underneath powdered with sand fleas. 

There are too many people in too small a space –- the sheer number of them shrink even the most vast of the open areas -- crowding him from a distance. Too many voices, and too much ambient noise: humming lights, the klaxons attached to opening and closing doors. Too many faces: dazed, sad, crying, and shouting at the agents through the glass partitions that separate them from the rest of the general population. Like prisoners. Like patients.

_"Have you found my children yet?"_

_"Why can't I call my wife?"_

_"Can I have something to read?"_

_"How long am I going to have to stay here?"_

They give them uniforms to wear -- tea-colored, scratchy chemically treated cotton, flimsy as hospital scrubs -- presumably to prevent anyone from escaping the facility while they continue to undergo rounds of follow-up interviews, examinations and facile medical testing: monitoring vitals, blood samples, cheek swabs... Herbert stops correcting the med techs on their technique after the first week, convinced of their inability to accept proper direction. He also stops asking "what is this for?" when extrapolating his own theories becomes more convenient and, given the repeated script from the techs, possibly truthful. 

Perhaps they’re monitoring for any immediate changes in their physiology.

Perhaps they’re _hoping_ for immediate changes. 

Perhaps this is all an experiment their secretive government agency themselves arranged and the returnees are all just a reluctant sample size of humanity blocked out for secret testing. Testing for what specifically, he can only guess. 

To make matters worse, the reagent solution he injected the night he disappeared should still be in his system... but seems to have vacated the premises. He was on the verge of detoxing before he disappeared, re-upping a further diluted solution the night before but afraid to take any more from the remaining sample in his fridge. 

For the first few nights sleeping in an ordinary bunk in quarantine, he waits in anticipation of more familiar symptoms under the itch of histamines and awakened nerve endings as the last of the opiates wears off. Violent tremors and secretions that would mimic conventional chemical detox if they didn't fluoresce under a UV-A light. Things that will land him back in observation and more invasive examinations if he can’t mask them quickly. 

In the end, there's nothing to mask. The most he gets is a case of dry mouth and a recurrent ocular migraine that lands him in the infirmary so often, they send a psychologist with the next agent interview.

"You've been hospitalized before, Mr. West," the doctor says. "In Zürich, wasn't it?" 

As if the file wasn't already open in front of her. As if the agent lurking in the background didn't have access to the same file and had likely either read it or compiled what was in it. Insipid, invasive, obvious. He scales his story to the basic chronology, refusing to yield anything else.

"After Dr. Gruber's death, I was taken briefly for observation while law enforcement and the university conducted the inquest. The doctors released me after five days." 

"Were you prescribed any medication?"

"Tranquilizers." Valium. A seven-day supply to help him sleep. He had taken the last two pills right before the flight to Boston, despising the way they softened the edges at a time when he needed to be most alert. 

"Anything else?"

"There would have to have been a diagnosis for that, wouldn't there?" he sniffs, as much as he’s able in his current condition. "No diagnosis, no need for medication." 

There were whispers, of course. Inferences to possible schizotypal traits, audio sensory sensitivity linked with social anxiety, possibly rooted in past abuse or neurocognitive development. All things that would take time and multiple evaluations to determine, and the inquest had cleared him of wrongdoing, which eliminated the possibly of involuntary hospitalization. In the end, the doctors were forced to let him go.

"Was that in error?"

He schools his face into a mask of propriety before answering. This doctor will have to let him go, too, eventually. Unless he gives her reason not to.

"No."

\--

There are no televisions in the infirmary or the observation ward: just empty apparatuses and loose wires where one had clearly been installed in each room at one time. 

General quarantine is different. There are televisions in the children’s ward with no broadcast connections leaving them little more than vehicles for the video players and video game consoles hooked up for the entertainment of the younger returnees. In the common area, multiple televisions are installed to be viewed from multiple vantage points, each set to the same channel spewing a 24-hour cacophony of news programs. Someone appears to be monitoring their media intake (and the flow of information) very carefully.

These are minor details Herbert would have ignored when school and completing the reagent were his primary concern. Now, he has no school, no reagent. Everything is his concern. Everything is related. Everything can help or hang him.

The broadcast news feed is relentless. In addition to the repeated debates about the fate of the returnees, there are military operations in the Middle East, hawks and pacifists engaged in cock fights of regurgitated factoids and emotional outbursts, an AIDS crisis once quelled at some point but now apparently raging in parts of Europe and Africa that were touched by American charities promoting something called “abstinence-only” education…

“Still no cure, then.” He doesn’t realize he’s spoken aloud until the person in the chair next to him answers.

“’Guess they haven’t gotten around to that.”

Twenty-five years. How many dead and needlessly dead...

“Never enough time to do good,” someone else says. “Or else people just find a time to waste the stuff they’ve got.”

“Drivel.” He spits out, pushing up from his chair and stalking back towards his residence block.

“Ray of sunshine, ain’t he?” someone behind him mutters.

“Aren’t we all, these days?”

He doesn't stop walking until he reaches his bunk. He lays face down, hands over his ears, and waits for the humming of the overhead lights to stop.

\--

He dreams of Dr. Gruber that night, smiling and warm, then spasming and still. The green glow of the syringe in his hand and the wet spurt of blood across his shirt. Sudden, abrupt, and violent enough that both he and his favorite agent are back in the infirmary the next morning, her asking him questions over water orange juice and off-brand corn flakes while he stares at the walls in yet another room with dangling cords where a television used to be.

"How's your headache?"

Throbbing. Heavy. Leaving a metallic taste in his mouth around the malty flavor of masticated corn meal.

"Fine," he answers. He leans in too far and the glasses glance off the side of his bowl with a resonating _ping_. He rubs his eyes hard, masking the indignity.

"Have the doctors ruled out eyestrain?"

He shoves the frames back onto his face, dabbing a smear of milk across the lens with his sleeve cuff.

"I have a question for you." He tries to keep his tone light -- like he's not about to launch an interrogation of his own. Fails. 

"Go ahead," she says. 

"Everything you told me about my disappearance, the trial -- none of that was in the file you showed me."

"Your file is a work in progress,” she answers, unperturbed. “The same as everyone else's here."

"Yes, but how do I know that anything you've told me is true? That Dr. Hill was tried for my murder or that my disappearance even happened?"

"Do you think that we've been lying to you?"

"Omission of basic facts _is_ lying."

“It’s never been our intention to withhold anything from your, Herbert, or the others. Our goal is to acclimate each of you on an individual basis – the world has changed quite a lot since some of you disappeared.”

As if the things he had already seen things in this world that would upset her perfect coiffure, let alone her world view. He was fine. And no matter how much things had changed, they hadn't changed enough. People were still _dying_.

"I would appreciate the opportunity to confirm what you've been saying," he followed up, impatient. “Surely there must be a library in this place? An archive, something? You've had no trouble patching in those disgusting news programs or bringing magazines for the others.”

"Eventually. We'll see what we can do."

\--

'Eventually,’ of course, fails to arrive and by the time Herbert is released from the infirmary, he's resolved himself to the deception. 

Information on the investigation and the trial is not available. Instead, there's an attempt at appeasement in the form of a stack of medical journals and a notepad. _Science_ , _Nature_ , _The Journal of Human Pathology_ , multiple issues of each dating back ten years. Dog-eared corners, covered with fingerprints, obviously retrieved from a staff member’s personal shelf rather than the clean, well-preserved copies an on-site library might offer. He can practically smell what the last person who read each issue had for dinner. He attempts meager basic notes before throwing each issue under his cot, wedging them between mattress and frame. 

He moves on to memory games: writing out the four main criteria for identifying neurotransmitters, the influence on exciatory and inhibitory synapses, the last three addresses he's lived at, the last three meals he's eaten. 

He makes lists of ingredients, equipment, first in German, then French, switching from his right hand to his left (and old trick he'd learned for disguising handwriting). When he runs out of room on the page, he turns it sideways rather than moving on to the next age. The different lists overlap each other, turning into a swirling melange of mismatched items and penmanship:

_4-ounce glass bottles (screw caps/rubber stoppers)_

_Norepinephrin, synthetisiert aus Tyrosine_

_666 Darkmore._

_Corn Flakes._

When he runs out of room, he rips the page out. He folds up note after note into tiny eight-folded squares. He leaves nothing in his bunk, keeping every note hidden somewhere on his person, using all the tricks he learned in the hospital and the group homes before that. It's a useless habit -- there's no evidence that the agents would take his notes or, upon further examination, even understand what they were for.

When he runs out of paper, a new notepad appears on his bunk. He starts over. 

\--

Everything is his concern. Everything is related. Everything can help or... In absence of what he doesn’t know, he relies on what he does know. He has no university credentials, no reagent, no ingredients to _make_ the reagent, no freedom of movement, and no end in sight. 

But Herbert's done this before, he knows institutional frameworks and guidelines. They will have to let him go eventually, unless he gives them reason not to.

So he attends meals, watches the broadcasts, performs a facsimile of socialization with the bare minimum of effort. 

"Why's the coffee got to be so awful?" someone at the table asks.

"Better than the army's."

"Better than the observation ward's," he echoes. The facsimile is... imperfect. The person sitting across from him hardly notices.

"You're a little weird, West."

"Aren't we all?" he asks, fingering the three notes in his pocket.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'The 4400' laid out some interesting parameters for what the returnees were told while in quarantine -- we see Richard Tyler reading magazines on national issues, cable news is piped into the common areas, but Lily Moore and Orson Bailey both walk out on release day with no idea of where their spouses are. Chalk it up to government inconsistency and bureaucracy letting certain cases slip through the cracks, but it makes for great drama.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The returnees receive notice of their release (and not a moment too soon for some of them).

The dreams return sporadically, replacing the white noise of the nights when they don't. 

Herbert waits for more flashes of Dr. Gruber, or the reagent. What he gets are disjointed fragments of random images -- the more detailed ones he makes notes of and shoves in his pillowcase until the morning. The headaches escalate to heart palpitations and temperature spikes, inelegant spurts of warm and cold that he conceals under the guise of sleep when he can, with trips across the hall to the unisex bathroom when he can't. 

The night one of his bunk mates follows him is the worst. A 14-year-old boy from Mouthe plucked from a freezing winter road in 1985 who weeps uncontrollably in French that Herbert understands all too clearly as the child bangs on the door after him. Eager to have a private space for his own nervous collapse. The cold dread in Herbert's stomach doesn't stop and his heart feels like it's going to burst out of his chest hours later. He manages to tamp it down by the time a familiar agent visits him in his bunk.

"Well, Mr. West, it looks like you're going to have a private room."

Finally.

"I'm being moved again?" he asks.

"No," the agent answers. "Your bunk mates have been re-roomed. On request."

Even better.

\--

They receive the news of being released three days before it happens, along with the rest of their personal effects. 

Herbert shunts the bin with his clothes aside in favor of the folder with his preliminary release papers, a photocopy of his new ID , social insurance card, and Canadian passport. NTAC, as part of their reintegration process for abductees, has also gotten him a conditional admission to Miskatonic and he will be able to resume his studies after he completes the Medical College Admission Tests (he is, after all, many times past the three-year expiration date). They're more than a month into the current autumn semester, so he'll be working towards the admissions process for next year.

Next year... making it a full 20 years since Herbert was last in school.

He's working out the injustice on a 1995 issue of _Neurology_ when an agent appears next to his cot.

"West, you have a visitor." Agent Baldwin is taller than most of his colleagues, smiles more, uses a more congenial tone of voice when addressing the returnees. Nearly two months of observation tells Herbert that he’s the velvet glove to the other agents’ strap. Focused on the welfare of the returnees as opposed to mining them for what they know about what happened to them. A wealth of liberties to be pressed -- Herbert chooses carefully and presses.

“May I change my clothes first?”

\--

Herbert's suit and overcoat have both been dry cleaned. The jacket is looser in the shoulders than it was the day he woke up at the lake and the pants no longer fit at all. Likely a result of the stress and the alternating IV fluids and military-grade food he's been fed for nearly two months. 

Eventually, he gets tired of fiddling with the belt and just throws everything else on over the scrub pants, tucking in his shirt and straightening his tie.

The long hallway to the common area is the quietest it's been in months -- just the sound of Herbert's and the agent's footsteps on the polished floors, the distance rustle of other returnees in the residence blocks pooling their effects, a shrill scream followed by sobbing from the direction of the infirmary. Herbert focuses on straightening his jacket and the hum of the fluorescent lights until the outline of the waiting figure is close enough to recognize. 

Daniel Cain looks nearly the same -- some lines around his eyes and flecks of silver in his hair the only signs of age even through a scratched pane of glass. Herbert stops when he sees him, moves toward the table with the microphone and gets as far as laying a hand on the back of the chair. 

But quarantine is officially over, give or take a few hours, and the agent unlocks the security door, abruptly bringing them face to face. 

"It really is you," his former housemate says quietly, dark eyes wide as they take in Herbert's too large jacket, what now feel like slightly over-sized eyeglass frames.

"I see you still have a way of stating the obvious," he replies, archly.

The hug is... unexpected. 

Not unwelcome, which is nearly as startling. And Dan's always been taller than Herbert but right now, swamped by arms and hands under the un-helpful smile of Agent Baldwin, he is hyper-aware of it. He turns his face into the arrhythmic thumping of his former roommate's carotid artery as he leans up on his toes, struggling to keep both feet on the ground.

“Dan," he mumbles, patting his friend’s shoulder once. Twice. Finally, he lets go.

“Sorry! I’m sorry,” he breathes, taking a step back. “I forgot how short you were – _are_. Are.”

"They called _you_?"

"You only had one emergency contact in your file, Herbert," Dan says, his tone indicating he was as surprised as Herbert is now. 

“Oh. Of course.” It had seemed prudent at the time – given where he was living – that his roommate should be the person to call in the event of an emergency. He knew no one else in the country at the time... and knows no one else now. “They’re releasing us this week. Is that why they called you?”

"Yeah. I have tickets at the airport. The flight leaves Thursday at noon. That is, if you want to..."

"I'll go with you."

It's not even a question.

\--

It's not quite that clean, of course -- he has to line up with everyone else to sign release forms and finalize his benefits paperwork. His previous J-1 visa (international student) has been changed to AR-1 (alien resident), in lieu of his "pending" student status. The agent attaches a dual-citizenship application as well. He agrees to weekly meetings with the regional Homeland Security office, verifies that the party he is leaving with is who they say they are – as if Dan himself wasn’t likely vetted before they even let him in the door. 

The two of them stay in a motel room that night. The one Dan’s been staying in since Monday – Herbert flinches at the smell that hits him when they enter the room: an accumulation of settled cologne spritzes and take-out wrappers.

“Sorry about the mess.” Dan says, shrugging out of his jacket. 

"It's all right," he says, surveying the contents of the room: plaster walls, two double beds, end-table in between.

His former roommate is a creature of habit – with rituals that have survived decades and temporary relocation. He lays out his keys, wallet, and a worn-looking paperback on the night table while he goes to wash his face in the sink. Herbert's eyes and fingers are drawn to the wallet first -- picking it up without a thought. It falls open to a photo of a young girl tucked inside a sleeve of yellowing plastic. She's smiling for the camera, a black cat on her lap (reluctantly, if the cross look on its face is any indication). 

"You have a child," he says, sitting down on the bed. It sounds better than the 'you've procreated' his brain spits out when he sees the picture. 

Dan smiles, unaware of the internal conflict.

"Ava. She's with Meg this week. I have her on weekends and holidays, three weeks in the summer. You'll meet her tomorrow." If he objects to Herbert going through his wallet, he doesn't say so. 

"Her mother is Miss Halsey?" The dean's daughter. Of course. His memory flashes to a petite girl, blonde hair, blue eyes, relishing the moments he could replace that cool disapproval with nervous agitation. He knew that he was weird -- he didn't need a bimbo co-ed's perturbed smirk to remind him.

"We got married after the trial. Split up about seven years ago."

"Oh. I'm… sorry." Dan looks as surprised by the apology as he feels.

"Are you?" he pauses, surprise morphing into amusement, then receding. "It's okay. We were happy for a long time. Things change. _People_ change."

The modus operandi of all matter -- all life. Objects in space. Time. Relationships. Herbert feels his lips purse in vague disgust, bows his head to keep from showing it. He flips through the rest of the wallet, stares at the business card for Dan's office for a long time. Daniel Cain, MD. General practitioner, two nurse practitioners also listed on the card.

“I thought you might go into general practice.”

“You did?" Dan glances up from the sink. Gaze steady and a little wider, like Herbert's managed to surprise him. "Why?” 

Caregiver instinct, inherent sense of trust, inherently trustworthy. A tendency to cleave himself to patients with terminal or chronic ailments and a weak stomach for loss of life that would get him into trouble the first time there was a car accident on the freeway and the emergency room took a hit... 

“I… thought it would suit you,” Herbert answers, puzzled by his own discretion. “More than working long-term in a big hospital.”

“Oh. Well... you were right.”

'People change.' His roommate, at some unknown point, had seen reason and risen to meet it. With that (and with him), the gap in time is made tangible, concrete, and more real than anything Herbert reads in the journals or watches on the news broadcasts.

There’s white noise in his brain and it blots out the world for a long moment… 

"Guess you were tired?" Dan smiles as he blinks awake, returned to a darker world. 

The bedside lamp has been turned off while the television blares a black and white film in the corner. In the span of however many minutes, Dan has moved from the sink to the bed, stripped down to his t-shirt and underwear for the night. Herbert reaches up to loosen his tie.

"I preferred not to sleep in quarantine," he replies. "If I could help it, that is." Exhaustion always won out eventually. Without the reagent, it always won. 

"Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you. Or stare. I'm just not used to seeing you sleep."

"You're not used to seeing me _period_."

"That too." Dan shrugs away the comment. Herbert stifles the apology he knows is appropriate for the situation. Sincerity would be difficult to reach for just now, and feigning has never been a particularly strong ability of his. And Dan doesn’t seem to care either way. 

He moves on to his shoes, untangling threadbare laces on ancient Oxfords while his former roommate fills the space between them. 

"You never slept and you were always… sort of speedy," he says. "You were energetic anyway. I just always guessed you were either manic or supplementing." 

"You weren't wrong," he answers plainly, hoping Dan doesn’t inquire further. 

The weak solution had kept him afloat allowing him to banish fatigue to the ether it deserved, giving him the focus and strength to work through the night several nights in a row. Seven weeks in Arkham, supplies running low, he had been waiting in dreadful anticipation for the crash he knew was coming the second he forgot to re-up his regular dosage. 

"Had you... the night you disappeared?" 

There’s no judgment in the question, which is startling enough for some of the dread to recede and for him to answer truthfully.

"Yes." 

"Shit. Coming down in quarantine must have been interesting." 

"It was out of my system," he says, swinging his legs up on to the mattress and leaning back against the pillow. 

"I'm sure it was after six weeks." 

"No. Not... _now_ ," he says frustration bleeding through. "It was gone when we arrived."

And that was perhaps the biggest injustice -- a sample of his blood, his sweat, may have yielded some trace of the reagent that he could work from to yield more, instead of being left with nothing. No notes, no samples, no resources. Square one.

"Probably for the best." Dan says. As if he could possibly know. 

"Were you able to keep the house?" he takes off his glasses to rub the sleep from his eyes, desperate to change the subject.

The first two months of his sublet had been taken care of in that first night... but a house that size was built for two people. And Dan's lease had been through the end of June.

"Not after you disappeared -- it was a crime scene,” Dan says, jaw shifting. “They found your blood in the basement, Herbert. Like, a _lot_ of it." 

Herbert was sure that they had -- he had often used his own blood for samples when supplies for specimens were low or non-existent. It had left him longing for Zürich and the comfort of Dr. Gruber's mentoring and access. Dan had no idea the low ebb he'd found Herbert at when he arrived on his doorstep. Oblivious, safely ensconced on the high that was his new engagement, his new home, his new friend. 

"You stayed in Arkham, though." he replies, absently.

"Yeah, my practice is in Salem so I've got a bit of a commute each day, but we're not far from the school. They weren’t allowed to tell me much, but the agents I spoke with did let it slip that Miskatonic is going to let you resume your course work."

"I have to take the MCATs again. Before I can go back." 

Another conditional admissions process. Not even re-admission -- he had disappeared before he could complete a single semester. More paperwork, more interviews -- a potentially lengthier interview process now that he was a part of the freak show that was the 4400.

"I have to do it. All. _Again_."

"I know it must be overwhelming, but if anyone can do it, my money's on you." Dan's voice is confident, softer consonants befitting the lateness of the hour. 

Herbert looks over to meet his stare, something warm lancing through him like a heated scalpel on cold, dead skin. 

“Is Dr. Hill still in prison?”

He knows the question is abrupt. Dan seems to have been prepared for it anyway.

“Yes. The murder conviction is being vacated but there were… other things, after you disappeared. How much did they tell you?” 

"They wouldn't tell me anything! Only that there was an investigation and a trial." 

Dan nods slowly, rubs a hand across his face. His expression is grave, gaze averted, when he finally does speak.

"I waited for three days. Your bed was never slept in but... it wasn't even made this time. When you didn't come home and you weren't in class, I reported you missing -- called the police, called the school. I even went to Dean Halsey and told him that I was worried about you. Your car was still parked out in front of the house, no keys in the ignition, couldn’t find your coat or the bag you carried everything in...”

His eyes land on the same coat and bag draped over the end of the mattress. Herbert listens.

“Hill broke into the house a few days after I spoke with the dean. I caught him snooping around in the basement, tinkering with all the equipment you left behind. He attacked me. Meg was in the living room, he grabbed her on his way out. Classic panic response. A police patrol picked him up, got her out of there."

‘Other things.’ Breaking and entering. Aggravated assault. Kidnapping. 

Well. If nothing else, it's a relief to know there were plenty of corresponding felonies that would be keeping the good doctor under lock and key.

And he can tell -- without knowing how -- that it's still not the whole story. The NTAC agent's description had been sparing and clinical. Dan's version at least puts names to the events described, retains the emotional resonance he would have expected from someone so close to the people and events… but he can’t help feeling like there’s something else his former housemate is holding back. 

There's a secret here -- Herbert knows what that looks like better than anyone and, rationally, he knows that it’s ill form to resent it. Certainly when there is so much in his own past that he has never told Dan about. Still, it's troubling.

"Let's try and get some sleep," Dan says, shutting off the television, abruptly throwing the room into darkness. "It's going to be a long day tomorrow."

"Is there anything else I should know?" he asks, eyes still turned toward the center of the room.

"Well, fair warning, you are probably _not_ going to like the changes to airport security."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Herbert is right to be suspicious -- Daniel Cain is hedging his ass off. When he's not flirting. So, business as usual. Dan's instincts about Herbert and TSA are also likely correct -- pre-9/11 air travel was a very different world. Canadian Herbert and Herbert using his own blood for experiments are both lifts from Jeff Rovin's novelization. In the world of The 4400, the former means Herbert would be ineligible for the welfare and rental vouchers offered to the American returnees, making his placement after release more of a pressing matter.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Herbert and Dan arrive back in Arkham.

Whatever secret Dan’s keeping prickles at the back of Herbert's consciousness, making a lump in his throat. It continues to bother him through two and half hours at the airport (and, indeed, he has no memory of security measures this draconian or invasive), and the six-hour flight home.

The secret is no more illuminated upon arriving at the airport in Boston or meeting Dan's daughter at the gate.

Ava, fifteen years old, has inherited her mother's short stature and her father's hair color and complexion. She meets Herbert's gaze evenly -- Dan's dark eyes as well, he notes; no surprise, brown eyes being a dominant gene -- her expression somewhere between awe and nervous bewilderment.

"I would hug you," she says, smiling warmly, "but Dad warned me that you might not appreciate that."

The consideration surprises him, after so many weeks of his physical space and person being the last consideration. Herbert tentatively offers her his hand instead. She shakes, covering his hand with both of hers.

The dinner that follows is oddly, stiflingly domestic. Meg does not attend -- Ava came to the airport on her own via the train.

"She didn't want to flood you," she says of her mother. "She was afraid that you'd be having too much that's familiar and yet not familiar way too fast. She's a psychologist, so that's something she's super cautious about."

If that's a lie, it's not Ava's lie. Herbert lets it slide with a nod and a hum of acknowledgment.

They eat at a Peruvian place close to the airport and, in spite of it being barely October, the waitress asks if he's Ava's brother -- and, by extension, Dan's _son_ \-- returning home from university. He wants to bark at her, for the impertinence, for the assumptions, for the inference of subordination... but there’s a lancing pain in his chest, a soft tickle of amusement somewhere within and outside of himself that he wants to crush with both hands.

He bears the indignity, however small, saying very little while Dan who knew him for seven weeks and Ava who's known him for two hours each offer up their respective expertise in helping him master the transition between homes and decades.

"You aren't allergic to cats, are you?" Ava asks, concerned. "Midnight keeps to the front room and my room mostly, but that's also just across the hall from the guest room. We cleaned up as best we could but I don't know how much pet dander lingers. If it's a problem, we can always get a HEPA filter! I just learned this trick for trapping mold spores and other microbes..."

Herbert shakes his head, eyes studiously focused on dissecting his stuffed chilies with the edge of his fork, the contents of which appear to be bone meal more than any larger, identifiable protein.

"I don't think that will be a problem, sweetheart," Dan answers for him. A release valve, reassurance pouring in both directions.

"Well, if there's anything else I can help with, let me know. I mean, if nothing else, your pop culture knowledge may need an upgrade,” she suggests.

"It always did," Dan says before he can reply.

It's a gentle tease that still manages to rankle, making him look up from his plate. Pop culture was never enough of a priority for Herbert to warrant more than a basic, working knowledge. He's surprised Dan of all people might consider that worth highlighting, even in a joking manner.

"You might be more helpful in that area," Herbert tells Ava, picking from that working knowledge now. "No doubt, your father still sings along with Oingo Boingo at full volume whenever he thinks that no one else can hear him."

Thrust and parry -- it makes Dan's daughter giggle and Dan flush with color, eyes gone still with surprise.

"You remember--" he asks. As if it weren’t just weeks ago to Herbert.

"I used to hear it through the floor every day -- it's rather difficult to forget,” he says, dryly.

“Danny Elfman," she chuffs. "Really, Dad?”

“It wasn’t always Danny Elfman!”

“No,” Herbert says, eschewing the dubious contents of his chilies and slicing into a piece of the parboiled outer skin to take a bite. “Quite often it was David Byrne.”

\--

“I never knew I played the music that loud,” Dan says later in the car, after they’ve dropped Ava off at her mother’s home. “You should have said something.”

Herbert shrugs. “It’s how I knew when you were home.”

Home and _alone _.__ Whenever Dan's girlfriend accompanied him, he would hear two sets of footsteps and no music. Sometimes shouting. Occasionally the creak of a bed frame and springs. But no music and no singing.

He hated those days the most.

“I didn’t know you even knew who David Byrne was,” Dan says.

“We’re the same age, Dan. I’ve never been ignorant of the cultural zeitgeist, I just wasn’t interested.”

“Right,” he said, almost under his breath. “Got it.”

The new house -- new to Herbert, that is -- is in Benevolent Street, not far from the university. Small farmhouse, near the end of an isolated cul-de-sac, and on the edge of... He squints into the distance.

“Something look familiar?”

“Christchurch Cemetery?" he asks nodding in the direction of his gaze.

“Right,” Dan nods, smiling.

“It wasn’t that long ago for me," he glances around, noting the empty fields on either side of the house. "Wasn’t the Pretorious Foundation around here?”

“Right up the street,” Dan answers. “Until the house exploded. The notoriety led to a small real estate blight. The neighborhood’s come back slowly but still just a few un-buried neighbors.”

“Cozy,” he comments, eyeing their surroundings – trees under the cover of darkness, the air still misty, but this time it is cut with crisp autumn air and dying leaves. He gives it a final lingering inhale before following his old roommate inside.

Dan has retained his affinity for mid-century furniture and antiques -- revealed now to truly be an affinity and not just a poor college student's inability to yield suitable furnishings from the local thrift shops. Herbert sits down on what appears to be the newest piece of furniture -- a large plush sofa. Placed near the front window as well. Old habits. He glances back to make sure it's not the same lace curtains.

"Make yourself at home."

"It's a rather large house, isn't it?" he posits, taking in more details: a few family photos, large book cases hemming the room in, a few mementos and antiquities acting as props and book-ends, some forgotten under a layer of dust. There's a lump in his throat and his pulse jumps.

"We did have three people living here at one point," Dan says, unbuttoning his coat. "Your room is on this floor at the end of the hall, door on the left is the bathroom. We've got the kitchen just through here, if you need to make a snack or..."

The sound fades out, replaced by static and white noise, a persistent warmth that starts in his chest and spreads out. He's asleep before Dan can finish his sentence.

\--

The time shift is longer than it was when he had nodded out in the motel. Not dissimilar to the rare times he slept under the influence of the reagent or waking up at Mt. Rainier weeks ago.

He can feel the moment he regains consciousness -- the knot of panic in his throat tightens and he nearly bolts upright to a standing position. A knitted afghan the color of a blood clot has been thrown partially over him. He pushes it away and does a quick inventory, impressed that his glasses are still on his face. He's been relieved of his coat and shoes, draped over the arm of the sofa and settled under the coffee table respectively. The messenger bag with his paltry folder of government paperwork and school materials on the table. At least this time he's alone.

Well, almost alone.

The black cat from the photograph peers at him through glassy, reflective night vision, perched like a monolith on the edge of the coffee table.

"I take it you must be Midnight," he offers his hand, curious to see the animal’s reaction more than in greeting.

The cat eyes him skeptically, venturing forward as its own curiosity wins out, sniffing and then grazing its muzzle against the heel of his hand. He reacts in kind, butting his knuckles in the direction of the sloped brow, stroking an ear between his thumb and forefinger. There's a steady purr as the animal lingers and flops into Herbert's arm even after vigorous petting morphs into mere support. There's an emerald glint in enormous golden eyes, unblinking, almost accusatory.

Familiar.

Herbert stares for a long time, reaching to pick up the protesting cat for a closer look...

\--

The cat is on Herbert’s lap (docile now, after a brief tussle, some scratches and bites) by the time Dan wanders in, in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms, scratching his head. Awake and alert in a way Herbert might notice as something new -- if he weren’t still in kind of internal free-fall.

“Oh, you're awake!” he smiles, moving . “Listen, the guest room's all made up for you if you want to venture in later. There’s some boxes of your stuff from the Darkmore house on the desk. I brought those down from the attic last night... Herbert?”

“Red-haired,” he says, voice steady.

“…okay.” There’s no question there, just acknowledgement and faith that Herbert will elaborate his point. It's a familiar exchange -- Dan had done this often in the handful of times they'd spoken, comparing notes in a lecture or passing each other in a shared space.

“’Rufus.’ It’s Roman for ‘red-haired,’” he clarifies. “I always thought it was an odd name for a black cat.”

But then his roommate had been a bit odd. More than he ever noticed, apparently.

"You lied to Ava," Herbert finally looks up to meet Dan’s eyes, which are curiously still. Unblinking.

"Technically, I lied to Meg -- _she_ lied to Ava," he answers, unfazed, the visage of amiable ignorance fallen away. "Not that it makes much of a difference to a four-year-old."

Dan moves to stand over him and Herbert realizes he’s cradling the cat against his chest. The thing stirs restlessly, moving to perch on his new friend’s lap as he releases him, face turned toward his master. Dan smiles, favoring him with a scratch, a light pull at the scruff of his neck.

"Rufus was six years old the year you disappeared. It was easier to lower his vital signs and claim he died of old age. And after that, it was just a matter of 'visiting the local shelter.' Pet adoption paperwork looks like anything else. And people tend to question themselves and their own perceptions before they question anyone else," he pauses, thoughtfully. "I'll have to do it all again soon. Midnight here is very spry for thirteen, but we do live on a busy street and Halloween’s coming up, too--"

"It works," Herbert blurts out. To the point, even as his pulse races.

Dan nods. A rare solemn expression, dark eyes glossy, almost otherworldly. Death defeated. Old news for the man next to him, but not for the rest of the world. Not for Herbert.

"My notes. They were in my room and the lab. They said--"

"Hill took the notes from your research with Dr. Gruber -- or what he could find of them downstairs. That's what the police found on him -- they were used as evidence at his trial to establish motive. But he missed the notes on the experiments you were doing in the basement. And the sample in your bedroom."

Two ounces of fluid in a four-ounce glass bottle. The vial had been in the refrigerator next to...

Rufus butts his face firmly against Herbert's chin, as if on cue, purring. He cradles him closer, strokes his fingers along sleek black fur, watches Dan's face, calculating.

"I was going to tell you after my shift." The shift he never made it to, thanks to whatever it was that took him and everyone else. His roommate's beloved cat, head trapped in a too small peanut butter jar under an overturned rubbish bin. He had been bleeding himself dry for weeks and it had seemed like a shame to waste the opportunity. “I was going to tell you _after_ I brought him back.”

And, of course, due to a beam of light from the sky, he had never gotten the chance.

"You couldn't have called or left a note?"

"I was running late! And what sort of note do you leave when that happens? ‘Cat Dead. Details Later?'"

Dan’s grave expression cracks then and Herbert can feel his own smile, ill-fitted and raw, break through. There's a mutual well of hysteria, built up over seven weeks of quarantine and two decades of carefully concealed madness. A helpless giggle finally escapes that Dan answers with a wry smile, and then laughter of his own.  
By the time they're both through, they're leaning on each other heavily, Rufus has long since fled Herbert’s gentle grasp and he can smell Dan's cologne -- heady and warm.

"It was my peanut butter," he finally mumbles, sniffing. An afterthought, a shadow of regret he doesn't recall feeling at the time, even as other things seem like yesterday. "I'm sorry."

"I need your help, Herbert."

Of course he does. Dan's a doctor. Save the life and do it quickly because, after six minutes, every effort you put in is a waste of resources. He had been given the same speech Herbert was countless times as an intern. If you could predict the brain death and prevent it, do so. But afterward, it was best to let the patient go. Dan had seen through the absurdity of that and been tortured by how widespread the consensus was -- which was likely why he had ended up going into private practice, someone who would never have to make that choice or face opposition when they refused the conventional wisdom.

"The sample that you found – I assume that's gone?"

Dan nods.

"Even with your notes, I was never able to replicate its effects. I tried..." his breath stalls and Herbert feels his own lungs lock up in sympathy, waiting for his friend to recover. "...but I'm a doctor. I'm not a scientist. I don’t know how it works.”

"I do," Herbert says, a valve released somewhere (again), relief flooding in.

"I know."

"But... I'll need supplies. Equipment. I don't have the resources or credentials to _get_ most of them." The volume in his voice pitches up, and his eyes are suddenly damp. When did that happen? He swipes angrily, uselessly at them. "We don't even know if I'll pass the MCATs to get the credentials -- everything I know is two decades behind the times!"

"Catch up,” Dan answers, as though it's all that simple. The confidence of no other option. And, looking in his only friend's eyes, Herbert thinks maybe something else.

He swallows, plucking words from across the weeks and decades:  
  
"Does this house have a basement?"

Dan's smile gives him his answer. 

**Author's Note:**

> The events Dan describes in Benevolent Street occurred in From Beyond, Stuart Gordon's second Lovecraft adaptation after Re-Animator. The Peruvian restaurant is a nod to the events of Bride of Re-Animator -- implying that Cain volunteered as a medic in Peru on his own. For those keeping track, Herbert's powers are starting to manifest and will be explored in the next story. Thanks to everyone for their kudos and comments and I hope you'll stay tuned!


End file.
